work in progress

Rubén Martínez discusses being at an impasse in writing, what he describes as surgimiento in Spanish, or emergence. His talk touches on his personal experience and writing, as well as work by other writers and artists.

Maggie Smith reads poems from Good Bones (2017) as well as other uncollected poems.

As part of the Institute for Inquiry and Poetics, Sin À Tes Souhaits (Frank Johnson), Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, and Raquel Salas Rivera read and discuss poems from their unpublished manuscripts Literal Dope (À Tes Souhaits), Racial Calculus (Villarreal), and Oso Blanco (Salas Rivera). Diana Marie Delgado leads a conversation throughout the event.

Roberto Tejada reads poems from Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), which he describes as inhabiting the "actual and surreal" US-Mexico Borderlands. He also reads from a manuscript in progress begun during the Coronavirus pandemic titled Carbonate of Copper, informed by a widening and blurring sense of the self, the human, and the non-human.